Like as the lips of a lady that forth falter yes, Shaken with happiness: The gates of sleep stood wide. I have waked, I have come, my beloved! I might not abide: I have come ere the dawn, O beloved, my live-oaks, to hide As a lover in heaven, the marsh my marsh and the sea my sea. O cunning green leaves, little masters! like as ye gloss All the dull-tissued dark with your luminous darks that emboss So, (But would I could know, but would I could know,) With your question embroidering the dark of the question of man,— While his cry to the dead for some knowledge is under the ban, So, ye have wrought me Designs on the night of our knowledge,—yea, ye have taught me, That haply we know somewhat more than we know. 115 26 25 30 35 40 50 55 60 The globéd clarity of receiving space This solves us all: man, matter, doubt, disgrace, Must in yon silence clear solution lie. Too clear! That crystal nothing who'll peruse? With trying to breathe no bigger than thy race The tide's at full: the marsh with flooded streams Each winding creek in grave entrancement lies A rhapsody of morning-stars. The skies Shine scant with one forked galaxy, The marsh brags ten: looped on his breast they lie. Oh, what if a sound should be made! Oh, what if a bound should be laid To this bow-and-string tension of beauty and silence aspring,— To the bend of beauty the bow, or the hold of silence the string! I fear me, I fear me yon dome of diaphanous gleam Will break as a bubble o'er-blown in a dream,— Yon dome of too-tenuous tissues of space and of night, But a bubble that broke in a dream, If a bound of degree to this grace be laid, But no: it is made: list! somewhere,-mystery, where? In the leaves? in the air? In my heart? is a motion made: 'Tis a motion of dawn, like a flicker of shade on shade. In the leaves 'tis palpable: low multitudinous stirring Upwards through the woods; the little ones, softly conferring, But the air and my heart and the earth are a-thrill,— And look where the wild duck sails round the bend of the river, And look where a passionate shiver Expectant is bending the blades Of the marsh-grass in serial shimmers and shades,— And invisible wings, fast fleeting, fast fleeting, Are beating The dark overhead as my heart beats,-and steady and free Is the ebb-tide flowing from marsh to sea (Run home, little streams, With your lapfulls of stars and of dreams), And a sailor unseen is hoisting a-peak, For list, down the inshore curve of the creek And lo, in the East! Will the East unveil? The East is unveiled, the East hath confessed A flush: 'tis dead; 'tis alive; 'tis dead, ere the West Was aware of it: nay, 'tis abiding, 'tis unwithdrawn: Have a care, sweet Heaven! 'Tis Dawn. Now a dream of a flame through that dream of a flush is uprolled: To the zenith ascending, a dome of undazzling gold Is builded, in shape as a bee-hive, from out of the sea: The hive is of gold undazzling, but oh, the Bee, The star-fed Bee, the build-fire Bee, Of dazzling gold is the great Sun-Bee That shall flash from the hive-hole over the sea. Yet now the dew-drop, now the morning gray, Now in each prettiest personal sphere of dew The sacramental marsh one pious plain Of Mary Morning, blissful mother mild, Minded of nought but peace, and of a child. Not slower than Majesty moves, for a mean and a measure Of motion,-not faster than dateless Olympian leisure The wave-serrate sea-rim sinks unjarring, unreeling, Might pace with unblown ample garments from pleasure to pleasure,— Forever revealing, revealing, revealing, Edgewise, bladewise, halfwise, wholewise, 'tis done! Good-morrow, lord Sun! With several voice, with ascription one, The woods and the marsh and the sea and my soul Unto thee, whence the glittering stream of all morrows doth roll, Cry good and past-good and most heavenly morrow, lord Sun! O Artisan born in the purple,-Workman Heat,— Parter of passionate atoms that travail to meet And be mixed in the death-cold oneness,-innermost Guest In the clarified virginal bosoms of stones that shine, Thou chemist of storms, whether driving the winds a-swirl In the magnet earth,—yea, thou with a storm for a heart, I must pass from thy face, I must pass from the face of the Sun: I am strong with the strength of my lord the Sun: Oh, never the mast-high run of the seas Of traffic shall hide thee, Never the hell-colored smoke of the factories Hide thee, Never the reek of the time's fen-politics Hide thee, And ever my heart through the night shall with knowledge abide thee, And ever by day shall my spirit, as one that hath tried thee, Labor, at leisure, in art,—till yonder beside thee, My soul shall float, friend Sun, The day being done. December, 1880. 175 180 185 190 The Independent, December, 1882. SARAH ORNE JEWETT (1849-1909) Sarah Orne Jewett is to be classed with Mrs. Stowe and Rose Terry Cooke as a pioneer in the little group of early depicters of New England life and manners. The country that she added to fiction is situated along the Maine and New Hampshire coast,- decaying little sea ports, hillside farming towns within smell of the ocean, desolate islands off shore. She was born in a decayed old hamlet that had seen better days, South Berwick, Maine. Her father, a graduate of Harvard, was a country doctor with a wide practice and it was from him that she learned the life that later she was to portray with such fullness of knowledge. Often she rode with him on his trips, heard him tell stories of his patients, sat in the kitchen while the doctor was in the sick room, thus learning her art in the most practical of all schools. Her first book was Deephaven, 1877, a series of Cranford-like sketches, realistic, yet touched with a delicious atmosphere of idealization. Old Friends and New, 1879, and Country By-Ways, 1881, followed, groups of short stories of the plain people she knew, minute studies made not. like Harte's theatric tales of California, because she had found picturesque material that made good copy, but because she had loved her native region and its people and would teach the world the nobility and genuine worth of those they might despise as ignorant rustics. Several of her books, like A Country Doctor and The Country of the Pointed Firs, are novels, but even in these she is a short story writer rather than a novelist. The latter book, perhaps her strongest work, is really a series of sketches with only a slight thread of plot. At her best her style is delightfully artless and limpid. There is a serenity about all that she did, a certain patrician 'quality,' a sunny optimism, that make her little stories, with their homely yet genuine characters, stand out in strong contrast with much of the excited and often vulgar fiction of her period. A NATIVE OF WINBY 1 5 eral generations of children. It was half On the teacher's desk, in the little roadside school-house, there was a bunch of May-flowers, beside a dented and bent brass bell, a small Worcester's Dictionary without any cover, and a worn moroccocovered Bible. These were placed in an orderly row, and behind them was a small wooden box which held some broken 10 pieces of blackboard crayon. The teacher, whom no timid new scholar could look at boldly, wore her accustomed air of authority and importance. She might have been nineteen years old,- not more, 15 dren in the class read their lessons in - but for the time being she scorned the frivolities of youth. The hot May sun was shining in at the smoky small-paned windows; sometimes an outside shutter swung to with a creak, 20 and eclipsed the glare. The narrow door stood wide open, to the left as you faced the desk, and an old spotted dog lay asleep on the step, and looked wise and old enough to have gone to school with sev-25 1 Copyright by Houghton Mifflin & Co. The spring breeze blew in at the open door, and even fluttered the primer leaves, but the back of the room felt hot and close, as if it were midsummer. The chil those high-keyed, droning voices which |